Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Translational Research

To show its gratitude to all laboratory professionals, the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine celebrated Medical Laboratory Professionals Week April 22-26, with a host of activities, such as Phillies Night, in appreciation of all the hard work and dedication of the hundreds of staff and faculty members working in more than 30 different laboratories across the Penn campus.

This year the Center for Brain Injury and Repair is reaching audiences of all stripes at the Philadelphia Science Festival, with their message of how to mind your brain from concussions with hand-on demos.

The labs of senior authors Yale E. Goldman, and Erika L.F. Holzbaur, both in the Physiology department, have been studying molecular motors for close to a combined five decades

Penn’s signature event at the 3rd annual Philadelphia Science Festival next week is a sure sign of the times. “Big Ideas: Funding and Innovation” draws on current themes and reminders of where the bright ideas really come from.

Penn Medicine will play a starring role in the Philadelphia Science Festival again this year. The Festival is a citywide collaboration showcasing science and technology every April. This year it runs from April 19 - 28, 10 days to celebrate the region’s strengths in science and technology, bringing together more than 100 partners from academia to museums to restaurants.

Knowing the traits of HIV-1 strains capable of establishing new infections could be important for AIDS vaccine development.

 To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all areas of Penn Medicine. “I know this sounds like a cliché, but one of the main reasons I’m interested in learning about the genetic basis of heart...

Metformin, the most widely prescribed diabetes drug, has come full circle from a home remedy in the European medieval apothecary called goat’s rue to now being investigated for a host of modern chronic conditions.

“We showed for the first time that clotting is reversible,” says John Weisel, Ph.D., professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, in contrast to a long-standing assumption that it isn’t. Weisel and colleagues showed how these sometimes dangerous knots of protein and cells are actually a dynamic, mutable structure this month...

Garret FitzGerald, MD, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Director of the Institute for Translational Medicine & Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has long said the current drug-development system in the United States is in need of change, “representing an unsustainable model.” He suggests...

Greg Sonnenberg, PhD, research associate in the Division of Gastroenterology and the Institute for Immunology, is one of 14 early-career scientists supported this year with an NIH Director's Early Independence Award. These support exceptional early-career scientists to move directly into independent research positions by essentially omitting the traditional post-doctoral training period.

Earlier this summer, Sarah Millar, PhD, professor of Dermatology and Cell and Developmental Biology, received an unusual phone call from Carl Baker, MD PhD, Health Scientist Administrator at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

The use of DNA in forensics is powerful yet subject to uncertainties. Jennifer Wagner, JD, PhD, a Research Associate at the Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn CIGHT), and Sara Katsanis, MS, an Associate in Research at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy at Duke University (Duke IGSP) conducted an exhaustive search of the literature and genome databases to put forensic markers used in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) into a context of current understanding of the human genome. Their findings are available in an early online issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

This summer, Garret FitzGerald, MD, chair of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (ITMAT), testified at a briefing on the Hill organized by American Association for the Advancement of Science that the current drug-development system in the United States is flawed and in need of change.

Vladimir R. Muzykantov, MD, PhD, professor of Pharmacology and Medicine, at the Perelman School of Medicine, is devising a recombinant version of thrombomodulin -- a natural anticoagulant present in human blood vessels -- that can be injected in the bloodstream of animals, where it binds to RBCs and circulates for a long time as a prodrug that gets activated at sites of thrombosis, preventing closing up of blood vessels.

A research article in a recent issue of Immunity from the lab of Mickey Marks, PhD, professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, in part explains the recurrent bacterial infections in patients with a rare genetic disease called Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome type 2.

Penn Medicine is building a war chest of approaches to enhance the ability of T cells to attack as many cancer types as possible.

Pet cpr 1In a unique partnership between veterinary experts and physician-scientists who study and treat cardiac arrest in humans in Penn Medicine’s Center for Resuscitation Science, the same research that is saving patients who suffer cardiac arrests will now be put to use saving the lives of beloved pets. The Reassessment Campaign on Veterinary Resuscitation (RECOVER), announced this month, provides the first evidence-based guidelines on how to best treat cardiopulmonary arrest in dogs and cats.

Neuro-oncologist researchers at Penn are investigating ways to help patients diagnosed with the most aggressive type of brain tumor, Glioblastoma Multiforme. Building on the Abramson Cancer Center's previous success with research designed to attempt to treat cancers using novel immunotherapies, and Penn's neuro-oncology expertise, researchers will be studying two different...

In a new Perspective piece published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-author Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, delve into a series of high profile court cases testing the limits of patent protection.